The Apartment

Just watched: The Apartment, directed by Billy Wilder, starring Shirley Maclaine, Jack Lemmon, and Fred Macmurray. I had forgotten what a great movie this is. It was released in 1960, just a year after Wilder’s Some Like It Hot. But the film it kept reminding me of appeared a year later: Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Blake Edwards’s adaptation of the Capote novella is likewise set in New York, involves an apartment used for illicit sex, has a female lead marked by an unhappy history with men, and a male lead who meekly acquiesces in his own emasculation, until one day he decides he’s not going to take it any more. The Apartment offers a cynical take on 1950’s corporate America, while Breakfast is a harbinger of the 1960’s youth culture that—in theory anyway—reacted against it. Or in New York terms: The Apartment is an Upper West Side movie—the “old” UWS, before Lincoln Center and gentrification—while Breakfast is pure Upper East Side.